[I know this is a bit of an oldie but Sport has been busily defending it on CARM so...]

The evolution of fruits and vegetables

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I would like to know how the story goes with the evolution of fruits and vegetables. With animals, evolutionists like to say that a worm, for instance, could turn into a centipede or millipede simply by the addition of some new legs. Humans happen to be chimps with larger brains and opposable thumbs. () So evolutionists like to look at different parts and try to figure out how they came about or how they got modified to lead from one creature to the next.

But what about fruits and vegetables? How would a plumb or a grape, for example, evolve into an orange or a grapefruit? You wouldn't be able to do that by changing out small parts -- an orange is pretty much an orange through and through. And what type of mutation would turn one type of fruit into another? I realize certain berries can be selectively manipulated to spin off new varieties. Same with tomatoes. But berries are still berries...and tomatoes are still tomatoes.

How would natural selection work with plants? How would a population of lemon trees (which obviously all came from lemon seeds), for example, grow trees that produced fruit that was not quite a lemon? Isn't a lemon a lemon? And wouldn't only lemons come from lemon trees?